The Librarian

Edwin Pryce had been a librarian for forty-one years, and he knew better than most men how a boy can be used.

He sat at the kitchen table of his apartment on Larch Street, at a quarter past midnight, with the lamp turned low and a cup of chamomile growing cold at his elbow, and looked at the message on the screen. Sure. Happy to help. What do you need? It had come eleven seconds after his own. He had expected it. He had sat for an hour composing the request, deleting it, adding a clause, taking one away, so that it would read as casual, a little curious, a little flattering, exactly the shape that would slide into a lonely young man like a key into a lock. And it had.

He did not feel clever. He felt like a man who has put his hand on a stranger's child.

The kitchen was small and very orderly. It was the kitchen of a person who has lived alone for a long time and has made a discipline of it. The kettle stood on the left burner, the toaster on the right, and between them, on a rack on the wall, hung four cups on four hooks, each with its handle turned the same way. Beyond the window, a streetlight lay on the wet brick of the opposite building, and a cat was crossing a fire escape. He sat and listened to the refrigerator. He was sixty-seven, thin and stooped, with gray hair brushed straight back and a pair of steel-rimmed glasses that he had worn since the seventies, and he had not slept a full night in nine years.

On the table, beside the laptop, stood a photograph in a small wooden frame.

He did not look at it.

…

Her name had been Sara, and she was nineteen, and she was the daughter of his brother, who had died young, and whom Edwin had taken in at fourteen.

It was not a thing he had planned. He had been a bachelor, a quiet man with a shelf of books and a standing Thursday dinner at the same restaurant, and the child had arrived at his door with a suitcase and a look on her face that he recognized. It was the look of someone who has decided in advance not to be a burden. She had stood on his threshold in a yellow raincoat, and said, "Uncle Edwin, I can sleep on the couch," and he had said, with a lightness that astonished him, "Nonsense. I have a spare room. It's full of encyclopedias. We'll move them."

They had moved them. For five years she had lived in that apartment, and the kitchen had had two cups too many on its hooks, and the refrigerator had been full of strange green juices. She had read everything. She had read the whole fiction section in a summer, from A to Z, and then begun on the poetry, and argued with him over the dinner table about whether Plath was a great poet or a good one. She laughed with her head thrown back. She left the bathroom light on. She drew on the margins of his library books with a pencil, in a small neat wiry hand, and he found that he did not mind.

She had a way of lying on the carpet in the living room with her feet on the sofa and her laptop on her stomach, reading things aloud to him. A joke she had found. A line. A bit of nonsense from a forum, where, she said, people were funny and nobody cared who you were.

He had never asked what forum.

That was the thing he could not forgive. He had been a librarian. His whole profession was a lifelong inquiry into what people were reading. He had stood behind a desk for four decades and asked, with an expression of courteous interest, and what have you been reading lately? Of ten thousand strangers. And of the one person in the world he loved, he had not once asked.

…

She had disappeared on the ninth of October, nine years ago.

It was a Tuesday. She had gone out in the morning with her bag over her shoulder to meet a friend for coffee, and kissed him on the cheek, and said, back by six, I'll make the pasta. He had stood at the window and watched her go down the steps. He could still see it. The yellow raincoat, the bag, the quick light walk. She had turned at the corner and waved without looking back.

At six he had put the water on to boil.

At eight he had called the friend, who said that she had not been there.

At eleven he had called the police, and a tired sergeant had told him in a patient voice that a nineteen-year-old was an adult, and that adults were entitled to go away, and that in nine cases out of ten they came home by Friday.

She did not come home by Friday.

They had come in the end. They had searched. A young detective with a mustache had sat in this kitchen, on this chair, and listened to him describe her, and written it all down, and borrowed her laptop for a week. Edwin had not slept that week. He had gone out with flyers. He had stood on corners. He had taken the bus to every town within a hundred miles that had a river, and a bridge, and a bus station, and asked, with his flyer in his hand, the same four questions of two hundred strangers.

They gave him the laptop back at the end of the month.

…

He had not looked at it for a year.

He had put it in her room, on the desk, where she had left it, and shut the door. He sat, in the evenings, in the living room, with the television murmuring and a book on his knee that he did not turn the pages of. He went to the library and checked the returns. He went to the grocery. He went to the Thursday dinner and ate it and could not have said what it was.

In the second autumn he opened the door.

The room smelled of dust and, faintly, of her. He sat down at the desk. The machine woke. And there, on the screen, as she had left it, without a password, because she had never believed that anyone would look, was the forum.

It was a plain one. White on black. A list of rooms. He did not understand any of it, at first. It took him three weeks, reading in the evenings, with a notebook, as he would have read a manuscript, to see what she had been doing there. She had not been writing about crimes. She had been writing, mostly, jokes. She had been the one who made the pun, the one who answered a long grave paragraph with a cheerful emoji, and thirty or forty people had liked her. She had made friends. He read her messages to them, with the hair rising on his arms. Lol you're so right. My uncle says the same thing, he's like a walking encyclopedia. I'm bringing the pasta tonight, don't tell him I burned it last time.

It was the happiest he had seen her in years. She had been happy somewhere that he had never been.

And in the last two weeks of her messages, there was a name.

It was quiet_hands.

He had marked it in red. It was not the only one. There were dozens of nicknames in her record, and many of them appeared and vanished. But quiet_hands had written to her in the private window, nine times, in the last twelve days. The messages were warm and brief and extraordinarily courteous. Have you eaten? You work too hard. It was kind of you to say so. I don't think anyone has said that to me before. I hope that your uncle is well. He sounds like a good man.

She had written back. Thank you for asking. Nobody does.

That was the last thing she had written to anyone on that machine.

…

He had taken it to the police, of course.

He sat in a room with a different young man, a pleasant one, and put the laptop on the table, and explained. The young man listened. He wrote down the name.

"We'll look into it, Mr. Pryce," he said, in a kind voice. "But you understand that the forum has thousands of members, and the accounts are anonymous. Quiet_hands might be a boy of fifteen in Idaho. It might be a girl. It might be a bot."

"I know," said Edwin.

"Then you know it isn't a lead, exactly."

"It is the last thing she wrote to anyone."

The young man looked at the laptop, and then at the old man's hands, which lay flat on the table, perfectly still, as if they had been told to. "I'm sorry," he said. "I really am. We'll be in touch."

They had not been. Over the following year he had called, and been put through, and told that the file was open. In the third year it had been under review. In the fifth, a woman had told him, gently, that there had been a reorganization, and he had understood that it meant the file was in a box.

He had gone back to the forum himself.

He had done it with a certain shame. A sixty-year-old man, in a cardigan, creeping into the rooms where she had laughed. He made an account. He gave himself a name, quill_and_ink, because he had a fountain pen on the desk and was too tired to think. And he sat, evening after evening, with a notebook, and read. He read for six years. He did not post, at first. He learned the rooms. He learned who spoke and who did not. He learned to hear, behind a hundred cheerful voices, the few that were different, the calm ones, the slow ones, the polite.

He never found quiet_hands. That was the truth. The account had been deleted the week after Sara vanished. He found others: dozens of them, over the years. He found men who were lonely and men who were cruel, and one or two who were only strange. He kept a file on each of them. He reported three to the authorities. None of the three, as far as he ever learned, was investigated.

And then, in the winter, a white mask had begun to post about the number of days.

…

He knew at once. He could not have said how.

It was not the name. It was not the picture. He had seen a hundred masks. It was the tone. He read the first of the countdown posts, on a Monday night, at this same table, with this same cup, and a thing in the back of his neck had gone cold and still, because the sentences were in a rhythm that he knew. They were clean, and short, and kind. They had a gentle falling cadence at the end, a courtesy that was not in the least warm. It is a pleasure to see the room so lively. Please continue. He had heard it nine years ago, on a laptop, in a girl's room. I hope your uncle is well. He sounds like a good man.

He could not prove it. He knew that. A rhythm is not evidence. A man who had read as many sentences as he had, in forty years, develops an ear, and an ear is a thing that can lie.

But he had sat and looked at the white mask for a long time.

And on the day when it said Today, and the room had shouted, and nothing had come, he had known what was going to happen, as one knows that a glass will fall once it has left the hand. He had not told anyone. Who would he have told? He was an old man with an ear. He had waited. And nine days later a video had come, and gone, and he had sat in the dark with his hand over his mouth.

He had needed a way in.

That was all it was, in the end. He had no authority. He had no standing. He had a notebook and a set of nine-year-old suspicions and a room full of people who would believe anything, and so he had done the one thing that he knew how to do, the thing that all his life had been his gift. He had organized them. He had made a list. He had given the room a purpose, and a set of rules, and a form. And he had found, among the dozens of faces who rushed to follow, one young man with a spreadsheet who wrote Thank you in capital letters to a stranger, and who had put the name of a firm and a street in a post, and who would, if properly encouraged, bring him to a canteen.

…

He looked at the screen.

Sure. Happy to help. What do you need?

Edwin sat with his hands folded on the table. He knew what he was. He had been a decent man for sixty-seven years, and he was about to do a thing that a decent man did not do, and the knowledge of it sat in his chest like a swallowed coin. The boy was twenty-five. The boy was alone. The boy wanted, so much that it was almost a smell, to be useful to someone, and Edwin was about to say yes to that want, and to use it, as one uses a lamp.

He is not Sara, he told himself.

He is not mine.

He thought of the girl in the yellow raincoat, at the corner, waving without looking back.

He took up his pen. It was an old one, a fountain pen with a chipped cap. He set it down again, and put his hands on the keys, and wrote, in the clear, calm, orderly voice that he used for all such letters, a voice with no weakness in it anywhere, the voice of a schoolmaster:

Thank you. That is very good of you. Let us begin with the cook.

He sent it. He closed the lid of the laptop. And he sat on in the kitchen with the lamp on and the streetlight lying on the brick, and he did not look at the photograph, and he did not forgive himself, and the cat on the fire escape stretched, and turned round once, and lay down.